{"id":211,"date":"2010-03-07T11:37:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T17:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lordandrei.com\/blog\/?p=211"},"modified":"2010-03-08T19:55:52","modified_gmt":"2010-03-09T01:55:52","slug":"friday-i%e2%80%99m-in-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lordandrei.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/07\/friday-i%e2%80%99m-in-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, I\u2019m in Hell."},"content":{"rendered":"

(With all due respect<\/a>)<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s not completely obvious, I run a hosting server. (Cue the endless attack from script kiddies and hackers) If one were to ask me what my profession is, it is Apple engineer. Granted this is without the actual employ from the great big Cupertino Company.<\/p>\n

I started on the Apple ][ in 1979. (Not a plus, not an e, just the ][.) 48K of non-floating point, raw computing power. For those keeping count, I have been programming for 32 years. (Okay, 20 in base 16). I will not list the Apple products I have owned or used, as it would fill up a pretty long laundry list.<\/p>\n

So currently I run a server. I have an Intel based Mac Mini running Mac OS X Server v 10.5. On this system I host about 8 different primary domains. I manage or administrate to some degree slightly over 70 domains. On top of the web hosting, there is also DNS, VNC, FTP, and a series of other acronyms. The result of this is also a fairly complex internal network that serves all the hardware in the house.<\/p>\n

A little over a year ago I called the death knell<\/a> of LiveJournal. Since then, of the nearly 580 \u2018friends\u2019 I had subscribed to: 27 of the journals have been deleted and purged. So let\u2019s scratch that as 5%. As an example I looked at Saturday as a whole. There were 117 posts. 38 by users, 34 of those were unique users, 6 were simply posting aggregated Twitter feeds. So, let\u2019s call that 28. That\u2019d be about the same as the number of journals that have completely bailed, also about 5%. I\u2019d say that LiveJournal is waning. At some point I\u2019d love to do an in depth analysis.<\/p>\n

But, I digress.<\/p>\n

On most of my domains I am now running WordPress. This is a DIY blog. Now, being the social networking guru in my own mind that I believe myself to be; I have a complex network set up. I make a blog post on my WordPress Blog. WordPress generates a post to Twitter. Twitter is linked to Facebook. So anything I write in Twitter that doesn\u2019t begin with a reply character (@) gets posted into my status. Then around 3:34 – 3:35 am (That\u2019d be 25 or 6 to 4) all of my twitter posts (I HATE the term Tweet) are compiled into one LiveJournal post.<\/p>\n

There. I\u2019ve covered all the bases.<\/p>\n

WordPress is amazingly configurable. It\u2019s simple so you can use it as is, but you can also beat the crap out of it and change EVERYTHING. (Score one for open source). It\u2019s also an active product. This means developers are always trying to make it better. This often includes adding new features to the system.<\/p>\n

One feature I discovered Friday evening was the ability to import all of my posts from LiveJournal. I\u2019m really not using LJ actively anymore. So I figured, “Cool! I\u2019ll do that.” I threw the switch (or more correctly pressed the \u201cGo\u201d button) and then something went wrong. My computer (server) slowed down to the speed of molasses.<\/p>\n

The server was giving me no indication that anything was going on or more correctly that anything was going wrong. At this point I should explain some little facts. I joined LiveJournal in October of 2001. This means my journal is about to turn 8\u00bd years old. My journal also has nearly 3,000 entries with almost 12,700 comments. I did not take that into consideration when I said, \u201cGo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh yes, there was one other little thing. Remember that whole Social networking interaction thing I have set up? Yeah\u2026 I managed to forget about that. My Twitter and Facebook subscribers however got the alert immediately<\/a>. I managed to spam about 145 Twitter and Facebook posts in a period of 5 minutes. The up side is that I did in fact import those posts to my blog. The mechanism even backdated the posts to match, converted the \u2018page cuts\u2019 and password locked any protected posts. Of course, Facebook and Twitter noticed and turned off my cross-post relay once the inundation ceased. The inundation ceased when I managed to send a reboot command to my server.<\/p>\n

I lost one subscriber on Twitter. I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s given up on my permanently or if he\u2019ll come back now that I know what happened. I also will still be trying to import the rest\u2026 but only after safeguards are taken.<\/p>\n

Next up<\/a>, Friday afternoon\u2026 things got worse. This time\u2026 not my fault!<\/p>\n

Share this:<\/h3>